THIS may be regarded as the pre-presidential year in English politics. All parties are aware that a general election cannot be postponed for much more than a year; and all are searching furiously for issues, programs, measures, which may prove palatable to the electorate when the moment for decision arrives.

SENATOR CARTER GLASS'S outcry against the censorship by the Department of State of private foreign loans seems to rest insecurely on three legs. One is legalistic—that the Constitution gives the President no such power. One is an objection to the policy—or lack of policy—which has been revealed in the specific approvals or disapprovals of foreign loans. The third is the general doctrine that the political government should not interfere in such economic matters.

BEHIND the renewed agitation for repeal of the federal estate-tax stand in solid ranks the President and the Secretary of the Treasury, the United States Chamber of Commerce, state legislators by the hundred, polled on the question by the well financed organizations who are agitating it, and many others—in short, a goodly portion of the organized wealth of the country. Some of these gentlemen believe, and frankly say, that they are opposed to any inheritance tax, no matter by whom levied. To such honorable combatants this article is not addressed.

FRANCO-ITALIAN relations are in the center of the European limelight once again. Just as France and Spain were about to renew their endless discussion of the question of Tangier, Mussolini sent a division of the Italian fleet there, to help the large Italian community celebrate the fifth anniversary of Fascism.

Mr. Wells, in The World of William Clissold, presents, not precisely his own mind as it has developed on the basis of his personal experience and way of life, but—shifting his angle—a point of view based on an experience mainly different from his own, that of a successful, emancipated, semi-scientific, not particularly high-brow, English business man. The result is not primarily a work of art.

Political satire in America is for the moment the monopoly of Will Rogers. Others may practice it for tiny audiences; his is as near to the sum total of the "picture reading public" as anyone can come. The paraphernalia of gum and lariat which helped him in the Follies is now partly laid away; he is on a vastly popular lecture tour; he broadcasts; he writes for the Saturday Evening Post; he publishes books. He has only to write a play and create a comic strip to become universal.